Dear CEO, re: blogs

RSS is a way to share content on the web.� I love it and use it all of the time.� It has drastically changed the way I get information.� My favorite news site uses RSS to give me news from around the world (and even tries to prioritize it just for me). RSS is something that will impact the company I currently work for as well as my last employer. I am not sure how it can be a positive impact though.

Both of the companies I am talking about make their money (in one way or another) from content delivery.� We are in the business of selling magazine subscriptions; they are in the business of selling email marketing services.

In the case of magazine subscriptions, the money comes from the value of being able to have content that you are interested in delivered to you.� We also provide the added benefit of being able to order content from multiple sources from one place (our company).� We also offer very competitive prices.� The more content becomes freely available online, and the more computer savy the general public becomes, the more our business could be negativly impacted by RSS.� However, as long as people want paper magazines delivered to them we will be fine.� I still subscribe to magazines, but I am finding them less and less interesting because I am used to getting information faster than magazines allow.

The email marketing industry needs to be watching RSS even closer.� Their money comes from the value of delivering (personalized though not really customized) content.� The business problem that email marketing services solve is that sending large amounts of email is difficult.� Staying off of blacklists is not trivial.� Ensuring compliance with regulations is also not something that most companies want to think about.

Not only does RSS reduce the cost and difficulty of distributing content to a large amount of people, it also makes it easier to gather accurate statistics.� RSS almost completely solves the same problem set for a lot less money.� The only thing I see preventing RSS from completely eliminating the need for legitimate (bulk) email marketing (spam will probably always exist), is the prevelance of RSS clients.� If Microsoft added an aggregator to Outlook and a syndicator to Exchange, that could be the begining of the end of the legitimate email marketing industry.� Maybe it wouldn’t be as dramatic as I am predicting, but I am making decisions about email marketing at work now, and I wouldn’t want to use email over RSS if RSS was prevelant.

This was in response to Jeremy’s post What would you tell your CEO or founder about blogs. BTW, Jeremy, do you think Yahoo would be interested in a "related magazines" RSS feed for MyYahoo?